Faced With New Threats, Businesses Turn to Industrial Warfare
One of the greatest threats to businesses in the Western world is a culture that makes them unable to compete with countries that don’t play by the same rules. A new system has already changed the culture of businesses in the United Kingdom, and has recently been released in the United States.
It began in 2005 when the British government was looking for a training program that could help U.K.-based companies continually improve. According to John Bradley, who at the time worked for the British government’s National Skills Academy, “We were helping companies become globally competitive through learning new skills.”
It was around that time when Bradley was approached by Amar Manzoor, founder of 7Tao, a U.K.-based company that trains businesses on the art of industrial warfare. Bradley decided to give Amar’s program a shot, and he said, “It was transformational to businesses” in the United Kingdom.
7Tao was designed to replace and go far beyond Six Sigma, which is a set of techniques and tools for business improvement. The system, designed in 1986, is the current standard used by most Western companies. Many businesses are having trouble with Six Sigma, however, since the nature of global competition has changed dramatically since 1986. Bradley said in an interview, “[7Tao] can out-perform Six Sigma, completely, because it’s looking at all the internal and external elements of a business. I don’t think there is anything out there that even comes close to it.”
“Most people don’t even consider they’re in the game, let alone a war of strategy,” Bradley said. According to Manzoor, in a new business environment shaped by the threats of Chi- nese espionage, cyberattacks, and cheap manufacturing, he and his team designed 7Tao to allow Western companies to stay in the game without sacrificing their values.
“We are in the center of an industrial war—the war for industrial dominance,” Man- zoor said, in a phone interview.
The Economic Dream
The global economy has been in an unusual state for several decades, and this environment will soon change, according to British author and economic commentator Fred Harrison. After World War II, the Western economy was able to dominate the global market because “they had no real competition,” Harrison said in a phone interview. It was a global economy, which excluded Russia and Eastern Europe, which was then ruled by the Soviet Union, as well as communist China. Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia had very small footprints. In this environment, companies in the United States and Western Europe were able to fire ahead “with no real competition,” Harrison said. “Today we’re in a very different situation. Western economies are under threat by China and India in ways they have never been before.”
The world of global business has become a hostile place, and business leaders are likewise faced with a tough reality. Western companies are faced with a new question, he said, “How are we going to defend against the Chinese low-cost production?” Western companies are disadvantaged, since high costs and low production make it difficult to compete against an adversary that relies on low costs and high production, while not playing by any rules.
Harrison said, however, that 7Tao could change this dynamic, noting “It lives up to what’s on the tin, as it were.”
7Tao works by changing the business culture, and while it’s designed to compete with modern Chinese business practices…
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